Quilting In The Ditch

I am a bit out of practice with my stitch-in-the-ditch quilting, however decided for the last charity quilt to just quilt it in the ditch.

This took me a moment

Was in two minds about this one as I could also have done some ruler work, however, I am a bit busy at the moment and the next meeting is coming up at the beginning of next month, so I thought I would just ditch away on this. 

My favourite ruler for ditching is the Handiquilter Ditch Ruler (on the right in the photo)...so I started with that. After a while and many missed ditches (I think I actually need to replace the grippy tape on the back...it does wear a bit with time), I switched over to a fairly new ruler from Bethanne Nemesh.

Bethanne's ruler is much thinner and I found it easier to massage the ruler into the right position as I went along. Some of the seams did not match up or were a little bit bowed, so I had to continually shift the ruler a little bit as I was stitching with a tan cotton which was quite visible in places. Bethanne's ruler was nice to hold and easy to manage...a good ruler if you need to concentrate on where you are going or doing some really detailed work. For this quilt, this was the better ruler to use. While it is a bit shorter this was handy as there was a fair amount of unevenness and I needed to stop and start frequently.

Onto the binding now...have two quilts to bind and about three quilts to hand sew the binding into place.

Karin

Quilt Along #4

This week's focus was on stitching on a line. I was dreading this a bit thinking that this would surely not work for me. I must say though, I had a lot of fun with this. It was a lazy Saturday...very hot over here, so there was not much else to do but to stay inside the air conditioned house. Sat down at the sewing machine and just went for it. Here are my lines:

Bit hard to see on the front, so here is the back

I was amazed with the result. The stitching was not too bad at all. The only problem I had was that as soon as I stopped, I sort of continued with a bit of a jerk in the line before I could straighten myself out again.The other issue was the change of direction - in anticipation of the change I would generally start making tiny stitches when approaching the change or produce a knot as I missed the point of turning and obviously stitched on the spot. This got a bit better once I tried a few more lines.

The next thing I tried was the motif. I got a quilt pounce for Christmas so this was the perfect opportunity to try this out. Worked like a dream and I got a bit carried away with this and kept going on this tiny sample. I used 50/3 Gutermann thread with a 80/12 needle. If I was doing this on a quilt I would probably use Aurifil 50/2 so that the build up of stitches would be less noticable.

Great fun. I find that I often do really well on my samples but when it comes to a real quilt I get some sort of stage fright - I could really relate to Leah's post about 'fear' the other day. This year I promised myself that I would not give in to this and move out of my comfort zone. With this in mind I recently finished a quilt with a basic feather wreath in the alternate block. Nearly jumped off again with thinking that it wouldn't work, would take too much time, let's just quilt in the ditch and so on... I persisted and as I had to do 15 motifs I had no choice but to become comfortable with it.

One of the many samples before I went onto the quilt with it. Not perfect, but good enough.

 Back to the Quilt Along. Next I tried following a pattern and stitiching-in-the-ditch

This worked fine except I think I need heaps more practice on the quilting-in-the ditch. Had the same issue as above - as soon as I stopped, I did some jerky type stitches before I got going again in a straight line. I also could not stay in the ditch at all times. What a timesaver though! Would be good to be able to do this and not constantly have to get up to change the quilt around. 

Karin